MEDIA DECODER; Roll Call and CQ Today To Merge Into One Paper

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Published: September 10, 2012

As many Washington-area news outlets continue their hiring sprees to feed the appetite for political news, two political newspaper stalwarts, Roll Call and CQ Today, are following what recently has been a far more common path in journalism. They are cutting back and merging.

Starting Nov. 13, Roll Call and CQ Today will become a single daily newspaper called Roll Call and will merge both newsrooms, which have already been working alongside each other. Executives say the new publication will combine the kinds of gossipy items that Capitol Hill experts rely on Roll Call for with the deeper policy reporting and legislative schedule printed in CQ Today.

"Roll Call will become the news of Capitol Hill, but also have that policy element," said Beth Bronder, publisher of Roll Call.

The move is the final step in a three-year plan by the papers' owner, the Economist Group, to blend many elements of the two papers, except their names.

The Economist, which bought Roll Call in 1992, created a company called CQ Roll Call in 2009 with its purchase of Congressional Quarterly.

At the time, Keith White, managing director of CQ Roll Call, said "the plan was not to merge into a daily newspaper" because both newspapers were holding their own.

"They were both in good financial shape," he said. "They were growing. They were doing well."

It made sense to print two papers, he said, because while young Capitol Hill staff members shifted to reading online more, silver-haired legislators liked to read print. Peter A. Anthony, senior vice president and publisher for CQ Roll Call's Advocacy and Engagement, said that he often spotted legislators carrying the paper editions under their arms and that older lobbyists wanted paper.

But CQ Roll Call executives noticed a shift in January 2011 when the House allowed tablets onto the floor. Soon even the biggest holdouts had moved to reading the news digitally.

When print advertising shrank to 10 percent of revenue in 2012 from 25 percent in 2009, CQ Roll Call executives were convinced it was time to merge the papers.

"The question came up whether it's worth it to print and deliver these copies every day," Ms. Bronder said. "Everything pointed to migrating the CQ Today folks to an online environment."

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.